I have a confession. I hate Santa Claus. As the parent of a small son, I should really enjoy the magic of the Christmas holidays. But I don't. You see, my son is six and he is autism spectrum and has a scientific mind. Every year, while other children are excited about the magic of Santa, my son looks at me with a scientific eye and wonders if I'm feeding him just one big line of bullshit. And, I am.

When my son was two, he wanted the Christmas tree decorated on our front porch because he quite understandably didn't want a strange, old man in the house. When he was three, he started doing experiments off the bunk bed with a reindeer toy to test the aerodynamics of the ridiculous proposition that reindeer actually fly. When he was four, he was upset at the unfairness that our Jewish friends didn't get toys, so he asked Santa to bring their toys to our house; he could deduce no reason why Santa would discriminate based on religion. At age five, he came up with a complex theory about how Santa "knows when you’ve been sleeping,” and “knows when you’re awake.” And, this past Christmas he questioned whether Santa might actually have a tardis - because, you know, that would make his job quite a bit easier.

My clever son was very close to figuring things out, and I can't wait until I can tell him. But, I don't want to be the mom who ruins it for the rest of the kids in first grade by sharing the news. The news that Santa Claus is bullshit.

I was arrested in 2006 and spent 11 months in jail. I knew what I did to get arrested, but no other information was provided to me.

The first week in custody, I never knew what time it was. My internal clock was gone. I didn't know if it was 3am or 3pm, morning or evening, day or night.

My family didn't know where I was. I didn't know what was going to happen next.

The detention officers inside the jail were no help. Every 20 minutes, they would do their rounds to check on all the inmates. And every 20 minutes they would pass my cell and I would beg for them to tell me what time it was.

Usually they ignored me, but sometimes they would laugh at me and tell me to shut up. One guard stopped in front of my cell, looked me in eyes, began to laugh, and said, "Fuck you.”

My fourth grade teacher told us that after Halloween of that year that moving forward, everything we would write for school would only be in cursive. That we would never write anything in print – ever again. For the rest of our lives.

About all that actually amounted to was that I had to write spelling tests in cursive through middle school.

My dad was an asshole. This is a fact. One day, 10 years ago, he vanished. This was right after we had discovered that he had, been living a secret life. He had been lying about a lot of things - from the mundane to the outlandish. Instead of dealing with confrontation, he just vanished. No one could find him; no one heard from him for a long time. Finally, years later, a friend sent me a scan of an obituary page. My dad died without ever trying to reach out to us to possibly right his wrong. Nothing was resolved.

There's a high school student in Arizona who is at the top of her class; she’s brilliant, creative, hard-working, and she wants to be an engineer. She's also an undocumented student, and her family has little money to afford college. Normally, a student of this caliber would be eligible for a number of scholarships, and with her smarts, I'm sure she'd succeed in whatever she pursued.

As an undocumented student, however, she's not eligible to receive scholarships from any of the state institutions in Arizona. And, she's also required to pay out-of-state tuition, which is nearly three times the cost of in-state tuition.

In the end, a young Latina who normally would have earned herself a ticket to college and who I believe has the skills and tenacity to persevere through a challenging engineering program and graduate to do exciting work that gives back to society will now be left without that option.

Bullshit is that they went and changed math. I have three kids, and I can't help them with simple grade school math problems. It's not that numbers have changed; the way you get those numbers has changed. I guess the way we old folks learned math was wrong and stupid, and we are all dumber for learning it.

My youngest daughter is in 3rd grade, and I can't help her do subtraction. I guess you can't carry numbers like I learned, and I am an old dog who can't learn new tricks.

I'm sure it's simple, and maybe it is a better way to learn math. But, I should not have to fight with an eight-year-old about subtraction and feel stupid. Bullshit.